December 31, 2013

This has really caught me on the back foot. There's been quite a remarkable series of events taking place in London from the opening of a replica apartheid wall at St James's Church in Piccadilly, London on 23rd December just gone and continuing up to, I suppose, the last day of Christmas. Well, the last actual event is on 5th January 2014 and I'm guessing the wall comes down the next day.

Now, as you can guess, zionists weren't happy with the whole thing and many made their displeasure known on Richard Millett's blog. Here's the man himself:

I understand that there are due to be a couple of last minute voices
putting Israel’s case at the panel debate with Halper “Both sides of the
Barrier: Separation or Security?” on January 4th but it is a drop in
the ocean when compared to what is taking place over the entirety of the
festival.

"Last minute voices"? Now I'm not sure of Dan Judelson's status with Bethlehem Unwrapped but here is his response to Millett's post:

Richard, good to see you at the launch last
night. A couple of important corrections to your piece. Far from being a
last minute addition, the Israeli Embassy were one of the first people,
in the person of the ambassador, to be invited to join the panel. In
fact, although neither could make it, Ambassador Taub was invited before
I wrote to Ambassador Hassassian. You may recall I emailed you at the
beginning of December to ask for Chas Newkey-Burden’s contact details as
I was very keen for him to speak.

In terms of corrections, the other point to make is that it is Lucy
Winkett rather than Julie. The rain did not make for good acoustics last
night I guess.

People are welcome to write whatever they like on the wall, ask
whatever questions they like at the panel discussion and Q&A after
the film screening. We’ve made that clear in all our invitations and
discussions with, among others the Board of Deputies (though this is not
to suggest they were content). I hope people will take part and listen
to one another, rather than retreat into fixed positions that brook no
challenge as so many of the respondents here appear to have done.

He made a couple more comments in the same thread which is well worth a look at but with 247 comments so far I won't reproduce it all here.
Well, whatever it was that led to the invitation to the Israeli Embassy and whenever it was sent and accepted, the Israeli embassy has now decided to withdraw. They made their new position known by way of a tweet with a twitpic of a letter:

The letter is hardly legible in the twitpic and googling some of the words I could only find one website with the letter in a copyable format and that's the Jews Down Under website which I'd never heard of before.

Here's their intro:

The Israeli Embassy had been invited to attend a ‘debate’ on Saturday night by the organisers of ‘Bethlehem Unwrapped’

They were only invited
after much pressure by the Board of Deputies and The Jewish Leadership
Council.. Please find letter from Embassy explaining their decision to
not attend, says it all really…

So the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the UK's Jewish Leadership Council got on the case to pressure Bethlehem Unwrapped to invite the Israeli embassy in London to attend a discussion? Is that right? Well that doesn't quite tally with what Dan Judelson said above. Also it seems strange that the BoD, which often seems to double as an Israeli embassy in London would press an organisation into inviting the Israeli embassy only to have the Israeli embassy eventually decline but here's the Israeli embassy's letter. See what you can make of it:

I’m writing to inform you that our embassy’s representative will not
be able to participate in Saturday’s panel on the security barrier. As
you know, our intention has always been to conduct an open dialogue with
Church institutions, and it is rare that we turn down an invitation to
participate in a church event, especially when it concerns Israel.

However, we have closely followed the unfolding of the ‘Bethlehem
Unwrapped’ event this past week, and have been brought to the
inescapable conclusion that this is not an event which is intended to
deepen understanding, or promote reconciliation but rather is a
transparent attempt to incite against Israel and Israelis.

A prominent quote on the homepage of the event states
“The most unhelpful thing you can do is be pro one side; it just adds to the conflict”
This week’s event has proven to be exactly that, a one-sided affair that unfortunately does nothing to bring the sides together. One of your event speakers, Jeff Halper, spoke in front of the
replica will stating it had nothing to do with security, while much of
the writing on the wall, contrary to our previous understanding, is
clearly political and divisive in nature

Where we feel that there is an openness to genuine discussion, we are
committed to participating and engaging in genuine debate. However, to
participate in an event of this nature would in our view be a disservice
to the hundreds of Israelis. Jews and Christians alike, murdered in
acts of suicide terrorism, which the barrier was established to prevent.

We believe that today, as Christians are being persecuted on an
unprecedented scale across the Middle East, churches burned and whole
communities forced to flee, to focus on a temporary defensive barrier
built to prevent terror, is to do an injustice not only to Israel but to
Christian communities across our region.

For these reasons, we will not be able to participate in Saturday's panel. We will be glad to co-operate with the Church in the future on activities that truly promote understanding and foster peace building.

So all that Board of Deputies pressure came to nothing. The main thing I don't understand is why the Israeli embassy withdrawal from the event is low key. Israel advocates are usually quite a noisy bunch.

Aha, that reminds me. I did hear rumours that zionists are planning a picket of St James's Church in 4th Jan. Someone told me that emails were coming out from these people, Sussex Friends of Israel summoning the faithful. Maybe Israel's embassy staff would be embarrassed by some of the people who turn up at these things.

Tony Greenstein had a birthday bash last night. He was four bar mitzvahs and then some. Rounding up to the nearest ten that makes 60. My spies tell me that the do was well attended but unfortunately one of the invitees couldn't make it and that was me.
Still, I've cleared my diary and I should make it for three score and ten.

Many happy returns Tony.

Regards

Mark Elf

PS: Here are the lyrics to a birthday song written by Deborah Maccoby and arranged and performed at the party by Deborah Fink:

December 29, 2013

We, she and I, had a little natter about it on Twitter.
Avital Raz's website is here.

I should have pointed out without prompting that the proceeds from the song are going to StopTheWall.Org as Avital Raz herself says:

Glad to see this song is shared. A lot of the press contacted either
ignored it on the grounds of it not being politically correct or Not
being black & white. I think its important to support art on the
subject to help make sense out of what's going on. Just wanted to add
that all the earnings from the download of this song are going to Stopthewall.org
an anti apartheid Palestinian organization. And I'd like to make a
point that I'm an Israeli (living in the UK now) trying to raise money
to stop the wall. Download here: https://avita
lraz.ban
dcamp.com...Thanks for sharing.

December 24, 2013

I dunno, maybe they're drawn to the raw sewage I keep hearing about in the news from Gaza these days but The Pixies cancelled an Israel gig in 2010 saying "We can only hope for better days, in which we will finally present the long awaited visit of the Pixies in Israel". That was Ha'aretz in 2010.

Bloomfield Stadium will be hosting a new international music festival
next June that will feature the first appearances in Israel of the
Pixies and of Soundgarden, two 1990s bands which are very popular among
Israelis.

The festival, produced by Shuki Weiss, has yet to be named.

Bringing
the two bands to Israel is a dream come true, Weiss said. He promised
that further details about the festival will be released early next
month, but did elaborate that the festival, which will take place on
June 17 and 18, will include nightly joint performances by local and
international bands.

So what's improved? What's made The Pixies change their minds? Don't they understand that normalising dealings with the racist war criminals of The State of Israel puts "better days" on the back burner?

The
artist Laila Kassab created harmony, beauty, imagery and symbolism to
express the harsh reality in besieged Gaza. The vivid colours of her
paintings are in stark contrast to the brutal blockade imposed by
Israel. But her choice of colours are also symbolic. For Kassab blue
expresses loss, deep secrets, hidden feelings, weirdness and
dislocation.

The
latest works Islington Friends of Yibna managed to get smuggled out of
Gaza are characterised by visual metamorphosis and a flow of merging and
evolving forms and structures often mixed with symbolist motifs.

Despite being locked in the tiny Gaza Strip and subjected to the
savage Israeli bombardment, Laila's artwork conveys love, music, hope
and motherhood, but the longing for being free of fear is an underlying
thread. The tunnels which brought life saving food are intertwine with
womanhood. Though Jerusalem is forbidden by the Israeli occupation it is
often referred to both explicitly and implicitly. Hidden keys and
keyholes symbolise the yearning to return to the homes from which
Palestinians had been ethnically cleansed.

Here are 4 photos of Laila Kassab paintings, smuggled out of Gaza for this exhibition by Islington Friends of Yibna.

December 08, 2013

It's true, Zionists in the UK are trying to use the Co-Op Bank's former CEO's alleged drug abuse to get the bank to call off its boycott of goods from Jewish only settlements in Palestine. Admittedly Marcus Dysch of the Jewish Chronicle isn't the most reliable of journos but here he is anyway:

The Co-operative movement has confirmed there are no plans to alter
its policy of boycotting companies which source produce from Israeli
settlements in the West Bank.

Israel supporters have appealed to the organisation to revisit the
issue following the resignation of Co-op chairman Len Wardle, who quit
the business after revelations about the conduct of its former banking
chair, Reverend Paul Flowers.

The Board of Deputies and Jewish Leadership Council this week
requested a meeting with the Co-op’s new leaders to discuss the issue.

Rev Flowers, who was believed to be a key supporter of the boycott
campaign, is being investigated by police over claims he bought, sold
and used Class A drugs, including crystal meth and crack cocaine.

In May last year the Co-op implemented a full ban on engagement with any Israeli suppliers known to work with the settlements.

A campaign led by the We Believe group has also seen Israel
supporters write to the movement’s new chair, Ursula Lidbetter, asking
her to reconsider the boycott.

They seem to be suggesting that there is a link between using crack cocaine and crystal meth and supporting a boycott of the State of Israel. Maybe they'll end up making the boycott look cool. That's what the "just say no" campaign did for drugs. Or maybe they're on drugs themselves.

November 29, 2013

Light up your life and celebrate Chanukah with the JSG and friends. Magical time guaranteed as our special guest is socialist conjuror Ian Saville who will take the lid off the mysteries of high finance when he performs his “Free Money Magic Show” that was a roaring success at Edinburgh this year. Chanukah gelt with a difference!

Please bring some vegetarian food to share(and some drink if you can)

All welcome – entrance by donation.

Not sure if smoked salmon counts as vegetarian food. Probably safest to assume it doesn't.

November 28, 2013

I was amazed yesterday when I heard a BBC Radio 4 announcer announce an interview withAmal Elsana Alh’jooj. I'm not sure how long the recording will be on the net but you can hear it certainly for a while here.

Obviously the big news for many of us regarding the Negev, the Bedouin and the State of Israel is the Prawer Plan so my amazement was based on the fact that the beeb was going to give its listeners a Bedouin perspective on the plan to ethnically cleanse between 40 k and 70 k Bedouin Arabs from their land in the Negev.

On 24 June 2013, the Israeli Knessetapprovedthe
discriminatory Prawer-Begin Bill, with 43 votes for and 40 votes
against, for the mass expulsion of the Arab Bedouin community in the
Naqab (Negev) desert in the south of Israel.If fully implemented, thePrawer-Begin Planwill
result in the destruction of 35 "unrecognized"Arab Bedouin villages,
the forced displacement of up to 70,000 Arab Bedouin citizens of Israel,
and the dispossession of their historical lands in the Naqab. Despite the Arab Bedouin community's complete rejection of the plan and strong disapproval from theinternational communityand human rights groups, the Prawer Plan is happening now.

The
Prawer-Begin Bill is an unacceptable proposition that entrenches the
state’s historic injustice against its Bedouin citizens.Adalah
and our NGO partners have been challenging the Prawer Plan before
courts, government authorities and the international community, but we
need your help to stop what would be the largest single act of forced
displacement of Arab citizens of Israel since the 1950s!

Now this is big news for most of us but alas, not for the BBC. Amal Elsana Alh'jooj spoke about inequality, exclusion, segregation, expulsion but all on a personal level with regard to her own dealings with her own community or the informal, rather than formal, segregation between Jews and Arabs.

Oh I'm sure her work is valuable and important but the BBC here seems to have deliberately distracted attention from a core issue regarding the State of Israel and its native non-Jewish population. They are under a permanent threat of ethnic cleansing and of course the reason Arabs are a minority within Israel's pre-1967 borders is because of a recent, current and, as we see, on-going ethnic cleansing campaign. And of course one of the reasons they get away with it is because of the help and encouragement they get from mainstream media organisations like the BBC.

November 27, 2013

Here's a bizarre story that highlights something I hadn't known about "the only democracy in the Middle East". Here's Ha'aretz:

An Israeli rabbinical court has handed down a precedent-setting
ruling that requires a mother to circumcise her son, against her will,
or pay a fine of NIS 500 ($140) for every day he remains uncircumcised.

“The
baby was born with a medical problem, so we couldn’t circumcise him on
the eighth day as is customary,” said Elinor, the boy’s mother. “As time
went on, I started reading about what actually happens in circumcision,
and I realized that I couldn’t do that to my son. He’s perfect just as
he is.”

The mother said that the baby’s father had a part in the
decision, but when the couple began to discuss their divorce in the
rabbinical court, he unexpectedly decided to insist that their son be
circumcised.

Israel's rabbinical courts are part of the country's
justice system and have legal jurisdiction over matters of religion,
including marriage and divorce, when it comes to the country's Jewish
citizens. [My emphasis]

Good for Jews? I don't think so but I wonder if Israel grants the same powers to the clergy of other religions.

"Having
visited Auschwitz twice - once with my family and once with local
schools - I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels
of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of
liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians
in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in
the West Bank and Gaza."

"It
is a tragedy of its own kind that from the people which had suffered so
much in Nazi Europe, and during a long history of persecution before
that, should have emerged what is today an oppressor state. To guard
against misunderstanding: I am not talking of the separate tragedy of
the Palestinians which is a consequence of this fact ... I am referring
specifically to the Jewish dimension: that out of this people, with all
its own historical experience of injustice, should have come so grave an
injustice towards another people."

November 25, 2013

I've just revisited this racist article by the Alliance for Workers Liberty's leader, Sean Matgamna as re-presented on the Shiraz Socialist blog of Jim Denham. In my post before last I highlighted a gem of a comment from a Harry's Place regular accusing Denham of using marxism to justify racism in the same way as some use the same pseudo-intellectual kit to support Atzmon. Well revisiting the SS post I followed through to another leftist turned zionist, Andrew Coates and found another comment which lays the above the line post to waste. This one is from Dr Paul, (Paul Flewers not to be confused with Crystal Methodist, Paul Flowers)

The AWL is quite inconsistent in respect of Islamism. It did indeed
warn against the dangers of Islamism in Tunisia and Egypt, yet cheered
on the opposition to Gadaffi in Libya, despite the fact that there were
quite a few Islamists prominent in the opposition, and al Qaeda elements
to boot, and they are now in the government, including a certain Mr
Belhadj, not so long ago a leader of the jihadist Libyan Islamist
Fighting Group. Why the silence? Similarly, in the Yugoslav collapse,
the AWL said nothing about the presence of jihadists in
Bosnia-Hercegovina and Kosovo. As for Afghanistan, it’s often stated
that the AWL (or whatever it called itself then) supported the jihadists
against the Soviet Union, but as I don’t have proof to hand, I’ll wait
for others to clarify this.
As for anti-Semitism, I have been personally accused of that by an
AWL member; not, as might be expected, by an inexperienced young cadre
over-enthusiastically projecting the party line in an exaggerated,
ill-learnt manner, but by the ganzer-macher himself, Sean Matgamna. Why?
Because I feel that the best solution to the Israel/Palestine crisis is
a single state in which all the inhabitants have full and equal rights,
that one can be ethnically and/or religiously a Jew, a Christian or
Muslim or Arab, or whatever. This, he mumbled to me in his inimitable
manner, was ‘an anti-Semitic position’.
This — a call for racial and religious equality and genuine democracy
— might be considered a little unlikely to occur in the near future
(but then so is socialism, and the AWL doesn’t stop promoting it on
those grounds), but only by the most abstruse logic — or the most
tortuous form of ‘dialectics’ — could it be considered as based upon
racial discrimination, particularly as it is predicated upon the demand
for national/ethnical equality between Arabs and Jews. Moreover, this
casual throwing around of accusations of anti-Semitism — that is, hatred
of Jews — in response to a political position such as this makes it
less easy to combat real anti-Semitism whenever it raises its head, as
it trivialises a very serious question.
As for the AWL’s presence in the labour movement, it has broadly
speaking been the most positive aspect of its activities over the years.
It was its trade-union work which attracted me to the group 35 years
back; other aspects, in particular its attitude towards the Labour
Party, put me off it. It is in respect of other issues, less directly
connected to the working class, where the less positive aspects of its
politics are evident.

This comment was followed with another little gem attacking Coates's assertion that the AWL has "real roots in the Labour movement":

“with real roots in the labour movement”
On what fucking planet? This noxious cult doesn’t even exist outside of
London and Yorkshire, so its real roots are by definition somewhat
truncated. The AWL ex-member interviewed in the WW had been a member for
3 years, not a couple of months, and the story he tells together with
the evidence of the email exchanges will be familiar to anyone who has
encountered this sect – bullying, suppression of any real dissent and an
appeal to sect loyalist groupthink, and crude scatological insults. And
talk about a few words being taken out of context is pretty rich from a
group which has been doing precisely that in order to smear people as
anti-semites for years (with AWLers of the Denham stripe, even words
taken out of context are not necessary, since he is capable of divining
what people are “secretly” or “objectively” thinking, often the very
opposite of what they actually say).,

Yup, that's certainly the Jim Denham I know. I'll have to dig some old stuff if only for its entertainment value.

But, in fairness, less look at Andrew Coates's less than ingenuous response to Dr Paul:

Well, for what it’s worth, I did not agree with them at all on the
Yugoslav collapse, and while I agree with the ‘two-state’ solution to
Palestine I would not go into detail about the Israel-Palestinian
dispute because it is like walking into a burning pit.
If you tot up every political dispute, all you get (as with us all on
the left) plenty of disagreements/agreements on a host of issues.
More fundamentally personally I do not come from, to say the least, their strand of Canon-Trotskyism.
Sean Matgamna is, as they say, “controversial”, but then there’s plenty of people in that category.
But on this one I was impressed by Solidarity’s coverage of the Arab Spring and a serious approach to Islamism.

November 23, 2013

On
24th of June, the Israeli Knesset approved the Prawer-Begin plan, which
if implemented will result in the destruction of more than 35
unrecognized villages in Al-Naqab and the forced expulsion and
confinement of more than 70,000 Palestinian Bedouins. The Prawer plan is
the largest Israeli land-grab since 1948. It epitomizes the nature of
Israel’s policy; Israeli-Jewish demographic expansion and
Palestinian-Arab demographic containment.

The International community has repeatedly called on Israel to halt
the implementation of the Prawer Plan due to its discriminatory nature
and the severe infringement it causes on the rights of Palestinian
Bedouins in Al-Naqab. The UN committee on the elimination of Racial
Discrimination called on Israel to withdraw the proposed legislation of
the Prawer Plan. Also, in 2012, the European Parliament passed a
resolution calling on Israel to stop the Prawer plan and its policies of
forced displacement and dispossession.

Injustice, humiliation and forced displacement are a recurring theme
in Palestine’s history. This is lesson that we as a group of youth take
to the heart. We will oppose, resist and work against the continuous
assault that our communities, across Palestine face. Therefore, we
launched the “Prawer will not pass” campaign with an eye to preventing
this plan to be yet another chapter in Palestine’s long and tragic
history.

Opposing the Prawer Plan is to oppose ethnic cleansing, displacement and confinement in the 21st century.
Join us by organizing marches, protests, sending letters to those
with positions of influence in your country or community, by doing
whatever you can, in order to force Israel to stop the Prawer plan.
Join us on the 30th of Nov. in saying “Prawer shall not Pass”.

November 20, 2013

Here's a remarkable comment from Sarah Annes Brown of Harry's Place and a few other zionist sites. She's criticising Sean Matgamna for a racist screed from 2002 reposted recently on the Shiraz Socialist blog of Jim Denham.

Denham doesn't actually post the most explicitly racist part of Matgamna's piece, which is here, but Sarah, who did a bit of digging, quotes it in her comment:

Jim – some of the analysis may be reasonable, whether or not one agrees with it. But this seems different:

“Like desert tribes of primitive Muslim simplicity and purity
enviously eyeing a rich and decadent walled city and sharpening their
knives, or country folk in former Yugoslavia eyeing a city like
Dubrovnik, so, now, much of the Islamic world looks with envy,
covetousness, religious self-righteousness and active hostility on the
rich, decadent, infidel-ridden, sexually sinful advanced capitalist
societies.

The existence of large Muslim minorities in Europe is making
political Islam a force well beyond the traditionally Muslim world: the
Islam which failed outside the walls of Vienna over 300 years ago is now
a force in the great cities of Europe.”

There’s a nasty snark in the first sentence which implies a low view
of Muslims generally, appearing to imply almost praise for the
‘simplicity’ of these tribes and then making it clear they are
bloodthirsty savages (unlike other people in the Dark Ages/Middle Ages).
There are problems with political Islam, sure, but this language is
tendentious. Also in the last sentence the enemy is not ‘political
Islam’ – just Islam – and this becomes a continuation of a clash which
notes dates back to at least 1683, an existential clash with Islam,
rather than a clash between one particular manifestation of Islam which
has arisen due to a range of social and political factors as Matgamna
seemed at first to be arguing.

Now that is good. But it gets better when Jim tries to pull rank on the non-Marxist Sarah:

I honestly don’t see any “nasty snark” there, Sarah. I realise you
don’t share all the “leftist” criticisms of Sean’s piece, and also that
you’re not a Marxist (so, for instance the fact that much of Sean’s
terminology derives from Engels, won’t cut any ice with you),but the
following strikes me as a pretty devastating riposte to “leftist”
critics of Sean’s piece:http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2013/11/18/reply-yassamine-mather

Hi Jim – don’t you think there’s a disjunct between ‘simplicity
and purity’ and ‘sharpening their knives’? I can’t say I find that
article deals satisfactorily with my first objection or, I think, at all
with my second (the Vienna one). I do indeed find the invocation of
Engels a perverse kind of appeal to authority. A bit like citing Marx
to excuse Atzmon.

Wow! What's that rule again? I think Sarah just bravely broke Godwin's Law but there's nothing wrong with that.

Of course there's a quick reversion to type when Jim denies invoking Engels as an authority and Sarah denies having accused Jim of that anyway. But those old one-two comments were well worth posting. Now she's made me late for the gym but at least she's confirmed I'm not too old to like surprises.

I ought to say here that as much as I don't like Denis MacShane, it is very cruel to leave him stewing over whether or not he'll go to prison but then, as a zionist he approves of far greater cruelties.

Back in the early 80s, when I (and Bertram) first knew Geras, he was an
important revolutionary intellectual - yeah, OK, big fish, small pond -
who was instrumental in mainstreaming the work of Rosa Luxemburg among
the British left, but was also active in any number of more immediate
areas. Definitely one of the good guys.

What happened to him
between his leaving NLR and the Iraq war, I have no idea. It came as a
real shock to many people who had admired his work and seemed like a
complete change of character. I at least found it deeply distressing,
although of course there were no excuses to be made for his later
positions.

Brecht:I saw many friends And the friend I loved mostAmong them helplessly sunkInto the swampI pass by daily.And a drowning was not over in a single morning.This made it more terrible.And the memory of our long talks about the swampWhich already held so many powerless. Now I watched him leaning backCovered with leeches in the shimmering,Softly moving slime,Upon the sinking faceThe ghastly blissful smile.

It could well be a lament for a friend with similar ideals to yourself who then goes on to embrace precisely what you both used to oppose, ie, the swamp. Apparently it's actually a lament for the self-destructive lifestyle of the actor, Peter Lorre.

November 15, 2013

No sooner had I predicted that the zionists wold use the original FUCU judges absenting themselves from the costs decision as an excuse to make out that the whole FUCU judgment was wrong, we see two examples of zionists doing just that.

Now, to be honest, Dr David Hirsh of the zionist Engage website gave me the tip-off in this post. He started factually enough:

Fraser’s lawyers argued that the tribunal should recuse itself from
hearing the case relating to costs because the tribunal had already
expressed a clear opinion in its judgment not only on the substantive
issue of harassment, but also on the issue of costs; for this reason, it
had prejudiced its ability to be seen to be impartial in the hearing
over costs....

The tribunal decided to recuse itself in this case. The judge said that
he did not accept that their judgment had already articulated a view on
the question of costs, but he admitted that a reasonable outside
observer may come to the conclusion that it had.

So, it's all about costs and whether or not the Tribunal had made it known where it stood on the ussue.

Now Hirsh gets a bit slippery:

In this sense at least, the tribunal admitted that it had over-reached itself in its substantive judgment.

If UCU continues its bid to punish Ronnie Fraser, its case for costs
may now be heard by a fresh tribunal. However, it is not clear what
evidence the UCU can adduce to show that Fraser’s claim was vexatious,
since the evidence upon which it is relying is the relevant section from
the judgment in which the tribunal appeared to prejudice the hearing on costs.

Now let's look at the parts of the judgment where the costs award against Fraser (and co) might be applicable:

177
The result is that the proceedings are dismissed in their totality. The
Claimant has put before us one claim which, on initial examination,
appeared arguable on its merits. Closer scrutiny, however, showed it to
be clearly unsustainable. And, being hopelessly out of time, it is
outside our jurisdiction in any event. The other nine claims are wholly
unfounded and many are also defeated by the jurisdic tional time bar.

Now the Tribunal did agree to the hearing so that could be a point in Fraser's favour but then again on hearing the case it found one of its ten claims was out of time and out of its jurisdiction and the other nine are "wholly unfounded".

Now the bits that could be said to touch on costs:

180
What makes this litigation doubly regrettable is its gargantuan scale.
Given the case management history, the preparations of the parties and
the sensitivity of the subject-matter, we thought (rightly or wrongly)
that it was proper to permit the evidence to take the course mapped out
for it, provided that the hearing did not overrun its allocation. But we
reminded ourselves frequently that, despite appearances, we were not
conducting a public inquiry into anti-Semitism but considering a legal
claim for unlawful harassment. Viewed in that way, a hearing with a host
of witnesses, a 20-day allocation and a trial bundle of 23 volumes can
only be seen as manifestly excessive and disproportionate. The
Employment Tribunals are a hard-pressed public service and it is not
right that their limited resources should be squandered as they have
been in this case. Nor, if (contrary to our view) it was proper to face
them with any claim at all, should the Respondents have been put to the
trouble and expense of defending proceedings of this order or any thing
like it.

Now they seem to be complaining more about the cost to the Tribunal than to the UCU but there is a little word of sympathy for the union having to go to the "trouble and expense of defending proceedings".

Now, it could be that whoever hears the costs issue will not want to dissuade future complainants from er, complaining but clearly the only issue the original Tribunal can be challenged on and is being challenged on is the word or two it uttered touching on costs.

And yet here's Sarah Annes Brown of Harry's Place (who sensibly remove their wacky comments after a week):

Another
of the findings was that the claim that Jews were booed and jeered at
in conferences was false. They spent a whole day listening to recordings
of conference debates. You're into some weird conspiratorial territory
if you are going to deny that any dishonest accusations were made.

Well now the Jewish Chronicle have put a marker down on the Recuse Excuse. Here's the JC's Simon Rocker from this morning's print edition (also on line, see link):

A battle over the legal costs relating to a defeated claim of
antisemitic harassment is set to continue after a tribunal withdrew from
deciding the issue.

The University College Union is trying to recover costs — understood
to be around £600,000 — following the action brought against it by the
director of the Academic Friends of Israel, Ronnie Fraser, who said its
policy on Israel amounted to harassment.

The same tribunal, headed by Judge Anthony Snelson, which had
rejected Mr Fraser’s claim in April was due to hear the case for costs.

But lawyers for Mr Fraser and for the solicitors who represented him
in the harassment case, Mishcon de Reya, argued that the tribunal had
been so scathing in their original ruling that they could not fairly
settle the question.

The tribunal had dismissed Mr Fraser’s claim as “a sorry saga” and
“an impermissible attempt to achieve a political end by litigious
means”.

The UCU will now have to go to a new tribunal. Judge Snelson said:
“We must recuse ourselves and a cost application should be listed before
another tribunal.”

I think Simon Rocker must be deliberately missing the point here. It wasn't the scathing nature of the FUCU judgment that was problematic for a costs hearing but the fact that the judgment could be perceived as having touched on costs. Rocker doesn't even mention that.

So the FUCUps are using the Recuse Excuse. Remember you heard it here first.

November 10, 2013

I've just seen from this Electronic Intifada post by Ben White that shamed former MP, Denis MacShameless has joined the zionist cacophony over the EU Fundamental Rights Agency's ditching of the so-called Working Definition of Antisemitism. Here's MacShameless:

This is interesting because I remember the BBC Trust writing the following explanation to me:

the so-called “working definition of anti-semitism”
referred to in the finding and cited by the complainant was published
on the website of the EU Monitoring Committee for Racism and Xenophobia
in 2005. This body was replaced by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights
(the FRA) in 2007. A press officer at the FRA has explained that this
was a discussion paper and was never adopted
by the EU as a working definition, although it has been on the FRA
website until recently when it was removed during a clear out of
“non-official” documents. The link to the FRA site provided by the
complainant in his appeal no longer works.

So is the discredited former MP saying that the FRA spokesperson is lying? I think we should be told but I'm guessing we won't be. I know what I'll do, I'll ask MacShameless for his evidence. Don't bother watching this space because, unless he's drunk, he won't answer.

November 09, 2013

I've reported before that the University and College Union is seeking costs from the complainant in the case of Fraser v UCU. According to Dr David Hirsh of the zionist Engage site, the costs are £580,000.

Lawyers for complainant, Ronnie Fraser, argued that the tribunal itself should not hear the costs claim because they so indicated their disapproval of the complaints in their judgment that they had already prejudiced the outcome should they hear the case. The original trio who heard the case agreed to recuse, ie, absent themselves from the case.

Here's Hirsh:

The tribunal decided to recuse itself in this case. The judge said
that he did not accept that their judgment had already articulated a
view on the question of costs, but he admitted that a reasonable outside
observer may come to the conclusion that it had.

In this sense at least, the tribunal admitted that it had over-reached itself in its substantive judgment.

I know how hasbaristas work. In future all the facts of the case will be cast to the wind in favour of the idea that "the tribunal admitted that it had over-reached itself in its substantive judgment". This will be their excuse no matter what eventually is decided on costs.

The section of the judgment the complainants are relying on is as follows:

180
What makes this litigation doubly regrettable is its gargantuan scale.
Given the case management history, the preparations of the parties and
the sensitivity of the subject-matter, we thought (rightly or wrongly)
that it was proper to permit the evidence to take the course mapped out
for it, provided that the hearing did not overrun its allocation. But we
reminded ourselves frequently that, despite appearances, we were not
conducting a public inquiry into anti-Semitism but considering a legal
claim for unlawful harassment. Viewed in that way, a hearing with a host
of witnesses, a 20-day allocation and a trial bundle of 23 volumes can
only be seen as manifestly excessive and disproportionate. The
Employment Tribunals are a hard-pressed public service and it is not
right that their limited resources should be squandered as they have
been in this case. Nor, if (contrary to our view) it was proper to face
them with any claim at all, should the Respondents have been put to the
trouble and expense of defending proceedings of this order or any thing
like it.

Read it over. Hirsh says,

it is not clear what evidence the UCU can adduce to show that Fraser’s
claim was vexatious, since the evidence upon which it is relying is the
relevant section from the judgment in which the tribunal appeared to prejudice the hearing on costs.

Now I don't want to leave a hostage to fortune (and what a fortune?) here but isn't that the whole point? A tremendous amount of expense has been gone to in order to hear and defend a case that was wholly without merit. Doesn't that in itself make the case vexatious?

But the zionists are in this for a reason. If the UCU are saddled with the costs they will have still won the case, in spite of what Hirsh says, on the substantive points. But that, as Asa Winstanly of Electronic Intifada has said, could deter other unions from taking a stance of international solidarity for the Palestinians. If, on the other hand, the UCU wins its claim, then the zionists will still try to claim some kind of victory on the grounds of the nonsense Hirsh had come out with, that the tribunal somehow, over-reached itself.

Oh by the way, still no sign of Anthony Julius unless anyone knows otherwise...

A friend of mine had heard about a film made by an Israeli chap called Mario Offenberg which had won an award from the Palestine Liberation Organisation back in the 1970s. Offenberg had been involved with the Israeli trotskyist group, Matzpen and had penned an article against zionism with veteran marxist academic, Moshe Machover. But the more my friend looked for this guy the more weird the details were that emerged. His old muckers from Matzpen knew nothing of him and there were some lurid tales swirling around cyberspace.

Now at some point in the late seventies Mario Offenberg fell off of the leftist radar and re-emerged ten years later reinvented as a religious Jew. It is at this point that his story overlaps in a big way with the resurrection of an East German Jewish community, Adass Israel (Jisroel). Now here's the extract:

In 1939 all the Adass Israel property was confiscated by the Nazi government, and then after 1945 these holdings became the property of the successor government, the German Democratic Republic. In time the GDR turned
the synagogue's property over to the Berlin Jew­ish Gemeinde (East),
though this was largely a paper transaction, be­cause the community had
no use for what remained ofthese facilities. In fact, the old Adass
Israel synagogue was remodeled into offices for a variety of GDR businesses, and the hospital was converted for use as the headquarters of the Deutsche Reichsbahn—the German railroad.

For four decades after the end of the war the
community seemed to be extinguished, remembered only by its widely
dispersed former members. The reemergence of a legally recognized Adass
Israel in the last years before the collapse of the gdr owed
its existence to the will of two men with wildly divergent purposes:
Erich Honecker, the head of the state, and Mario Offenberg, a descendant
of an Adass Israel family, who had grown up in Israel but moved to West
Berlin to complete his education. How Offenberg became the beneficiary
of Honecker's ambitions, assuming the leadership of a phantom Gemeinde,
richly supported by the GDR, still remains in many ways unexplained.

In 1975 Offenberg
completed his studies at the Free University in Berlin and presented
his doctoral dissertation, titled "Communism in Palestine: Nation and
Class in the Anticolonial Revolution." The anti-Zionist thesis proposed a
union of Arabs and Jews against imperial­ism. For the next three years,
Offenberg worked as a documentary filmmaker, screening his films about
the conflict between Arabs and Jews in Israel at Leipzig film festivals.
In 1977 the Palestine Liberation Organization gave him an award for his documentary The Struggle for Land, or Palestine in Israel.6"

A
decade later a very different Mario Offenberg appeared in East Berlin,
now intent on reviving Adass Israel. Whatever old Adassian-ers still
survived in East Berlin were well hidden. The result was that Mario
Offenberg and his father, Ari, constituted the entire resident Gemeinde.
But this was a crucial moment, for a portion of the old Adass Israel
cemetery in Wittlicher Strasse was in danger of being used for a new
building for the STASI. Although
the cemetery was nominally in the hands of the Jewish Gemeinde (East),
it had been neglected since 1974, when its single caretaker retired.

Because the rear portion of the cemetery was not fenced in
and the rest of the walls were crumbling, it had become easy prey for
vandals. It was this seemingly unused rear portion that the Gemeinde in
December 1982 sold to the Ministry for State Security, which planned to
build offices and apartments there.

In November 1985 Mario Offenberg
claimed that during the war this area had been used for illegal Jewish
burials and was therefore hallowed ground. His trump card in approaching
Honecker, however, was the news that he had invited Adassianers from
all over the world to come to a reunion in Berlin in June 1986. What
Honecker did not want at this point was the report abroad of a neglected
and vandalized Jewish cemetery.

What happened next was astonishing. In January 1986, by
Honecker's order, the best resources in Berlin were galvanized to work
on the cemetery. During a hard winter the craftsmen even brought in
special warming devices to make possible the fine restoration work on
the stone. By June the walls had been rebuilt, the gravestones righted,
the brush cleared. When one hundred Adassianers arrived from abroad to
visit their family graves, they saw only a well-tended ceme­tery, which
was solemnly rededicated in their presence.7

68
During this visit the surviving Adassianers and their descendants
formed a new Society for the Advancement of Adass Israel in Berlin,
whose pur­pose was the reestablishment of the Gemeinde and the
reclamation of all its property.69 They also gave Mario Offenberg their proxies au­thorizing him to continue his work.

But neither the West Berlin city government nor
the Gemeinde in the West was willing to recognize the legitimacy of the
Offenbergs or to acknowledge that their Adass Israel was the successor to the Gemeinde extinguished by the Nazis in 1939. After
Offenberg's first brilliant coup in restoring the Wittlicher Strasse
cemetery, the East German regime became more cautious about offering
support. The Offenbergs retained a lawyer, Lothar de Maziere, to present
their cause to the government. There was division,
however, at the highest levels. While State Secretary Klaus Gysi wanted
to recognize the new Adass Israel as the successor to the prewar
Gemeinde, the Central Committee of the Party was unwilling to restore
the "People's" prop­erty to private hands. In addition, the heads of the
established Gemeinden, both East and West—Peter Kirchner and Heinz
Galin-ski, respectively—made no secret of their view that Offenberg was
an interloper and that the property of the old Adass Israel should not
be turned over to his committee.

But all the principals were overtaken by history. On November 9, 1989, the
Berlin wall fell and a new provisional government came into power in
East Germany. By a great stroke of fortune, the new minister for
religious affairs was none other than Lothar de Maziere. With a friend
in a high place in the government, things began to go rather better for
the Offenbergs.

On December 14,1989 the
Council of Min­isters of the newly formed government voted to restore
all rights to the Adass Israel Gemeinde and offered it all necessary
government help.70 The following March, the council voted to support the Adass Israel Gemeinde with a budget of 810,000 marks
for the year, including salaries for fifteen employees—among them three
caretakers for the cemetery, a librarian, a Hebrew teacher, a rabbi,
and a kosher slaugh­terer. Mario Offenberg retained the position of
executive director.

At this point two of the rooms in the old
Artilleriestrasse com­plex (renamed Tucholskystrasse by the GDR) had
been cleared and placed at the disposal of the new Gemeinde. Eventually
the entire building was returned to Adass Israel, which reestablished
the syna­gogue, restored the ritual bath, and began to build its
communal life, hoping to attract Orthodox Jews from both East and West.
The most significant source of new members were the Russian Jews who
began arriving in increasing numbers as a consequence of the rising
anti-Semitism and governmental chaos at home.

When the East German government in the spring of1990 passed a resolution "to offer asylum to persecuted Jews," it encouraged them to pack up and leave. By February 1991 some four thousand had taken advantage of this offer.71

72 Actively seeking out the newcomers, by the end of 1990 Adass Israel claimed two hundred members, most of them Russian immigrants.73 As
newcomers to the West, they needed an introduction into two cul­tures:
the new German world in which they hoped to live and the old Jewish
tradition, which many were discovering for the first time. Whether they
would remain with the rigors of Orthodoxy as prac­ticed by Adass Israel
once they were established in Germany was something that would be
resolved in the future.

Whether the current Adass Israel is finally determined to be the legal successor to the institution founded in 1869, there
is no doubt that the modern congregation is of a very different order
from the original, which was composed of scholars and those committed to
the wholehearted practice of Orthodox Judaism; the new congrega­tion is
largely made up of those trying to find their way, and of new­comers to
Judaism, learning its basic precepts.

The strained relations of Adass Israel with the Gemeinde of Berlin were resolved only in 1997......

Apologies for the haphazard footnote numbers. I've no idea where the actual footnotes are but by all means follow the link above or check out the actual book.

Now that book was first published in 2002 but the plot seems to have thickened some time after 1997. See this article on the FringeGroups website about "what amounts to a sham synagogue":

In the meantime, this new Adass Jisroel continues to exist, at least on
paper. No rabbi is mentioned on its website. It runs what it calls a
kosher restaurant, but when I visited this establishment last month
there was no Jewish personnel to be found in it. All inquiries are to
be directed to its office, I was told. But this office, when I tried to
visit it, just happened to be closed, as it also happened to be closed
when others tried to visit it. AJ is said to have a synagogue, but
attendance there is allowed only by appointment. The large AJ cemetery,
which was given to Offenberg by the GDR government, cannot be visited
except by appointment; people I know tried to make such appointment but
were told that 6:30 in the morning is the one and only time for which
an appointment can be considered.

Last year there were press stories
that the Berlin government is demanding proper accounting of the funds
that it has channelled to Offenberg, as required by law, but apparently
refused by Dr. O. Then the story was quietly dropped. When I was in
Berlin now, I met with a reporter from one of the Jewish papers (who, of
course, was not Jewish himself). I was interviewed most courteously,
and a most courteous account of my visit was published. But there was
not a word about the main interest that I expressed in the interview,
viz. Adass Jisroel. The reporter later told me why this was
red-pencilled by his editor: let sleeping dogs lie.

UPDATE, March 26, 2012: It now seems that a new court judgment
has recognized the fraudulent nature of Offenberg's operation, and that
this so-called synagogue may well be forced to shut down.

An investigation found that the congregation had claimed government
subsidies for nonexistent personnel and for a fleet of cars without
submitting a drivers’ log. Synagogue director Mario Offenberg and his
wife also reportedly charged the state for their annual business-class
flight to Spain, claiming they were visiting the local Jewish community.

Tagesspiegel reported that the Berlin Senate told the court it
doubted that Adass Yisroel actually had any members other than
Offenberg.

So Israeli becomes Trot, Trot gets religion, religious ex-Trot is accused of fraud on a super-chutzpahdich scale of which you can also read more in Ha'aretz and presumably elsewhere.

I suppose I could have simply said that at the outset and spared you the details so I know I got completely carried away there with what I found to be a fascinating story which has been available on line for a long time.

All I really wanted to know is what happened to the movie, The Struggle for Land, or Palestine in Israel? Are there any surviving copies? Is it on video, DVD or what? Ok, I wouldn't mind knowing what happened to Mario Offenberg but I really would like to locate the documentary. Any offers? Let me know.